Research from several disciplines has been examined to create this literature review of information on document design, the overall movement toward producing public documents that the intended users can understand. Six chapters review appropriate research from the areas of psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, instructional research, readability, human factors, and typography/graphics. A seventh chapter, written in the form of a case study, illustrates the development of an actual document design experiment, showing how research from the different disciplines can be used collectively to treat a typical document design issue. An appendix contains lists of references used in the seven chapters. (RL)